Ava DuVernay’s “A Wrinkle in Time,” Reviewed

Storm Reid (pictured left) and Levi Miller play the classmates Meg and Calvin in the film adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s classic children’s novel.

Photograph by Atsushi Nishijima / Walt Disney Studios / Everett

Madeleine L’Engle’s novel “A Wrinkle in Time” wasn’t part of my
childhood—I only caught up with the book recently—but I wish it had
been. My encomium to a classic is hardly needed, but L’Engle’s creation
of complex but fantasy-tweaked kids facing fantastic settings and
situations that are extravagant but coherent, enriched by a heady blend
of science and spirituality, is a spark to imagination that’s all the
more potent for its introspective, psychological specificity. Ava DuVernay’s film adaptation of it, which opens tomorrow, catches the
sense of exhilaration and wonder that arises from the story’s elements
of fantasy. She builds the entire movie around a core of dramatic
intensity that differs significantly from that of the novel but
nonetheless gives rise to several emblematic images (many quite simple
and detached from the realm of intergalactic adventure) that resonate
beyond the confines of the story. But the script (by Jennifer Lee and
Jeff Stockwell) dulls the sharpest details and eliminates the most
idiosyncratic aspects of the novel, including most of the fascinatingly
intricate world-building; what remains is a story that delivers
emotional moments and delightful details that only vaguely cohere.

The story is centered on the children of the Murry family and, in
particular, Meg (Storm Reid), who, in the novel, is about thirteen, and
seems to be about the same age in the film. Meg is a middle-schooler
with trouble at home and trouble in school. She’s being raised by her
mother, Kate (Gugu Mbatha-Raw); her father, Alex (Chris Pine), seen in
flashbacks, hasn’t been seen or heard from in four years, and his
absence is the subject of derision from classmates and gossip among
teachers, all of whom mock Kate and Meg for their belief that he’ll
eventually come back. A smart student, Meg has let her grades and her
attention slip and started acting out violently in school. Her
hyperintuitive younger brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), who was
adopted soon before Alex’s departure, also maintains confidence in his
return.

A strange visitor, Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), dressed in windings
of white sheets, turns up at the Murry house. She meets Meg, Charles
Wallace, and Meg’s classmate Calvin (Levi Miller), a loner who attaches
himself to the siblings. They’re soon joined by two other
superpowered women: Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), who speaks in a virtual
encyclopedia of aptly chosen literary quotations, and the mighty and
colossal Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey), who shrinks herself to human scale
for the sake of good company but retains her universe-shaking powers.
Together, they propel the three children and themselves to distant
planets—Uriel, Orion, Camazotz—via a turn of magic that’s also a turn of
science, travelling billions of light-years in seconds by
“tessering”—passing through a tesseract, the titular twist of the laws
of physics, which is also a convergence of space. The reason for the
journey is to find and rescue Meg’s father, which requires combat with a
satanic figure—an enormous, tentacular black monster that pursues the
children throughout the film—and an ultimate agent of evil called only
“It.”

Whereas L’Engle’s book is replete with explicit Christian citations, the
movie offers no overt religious references, not even any overt
spirituality (other than a passing reference to faith “in who you are”).
To balance this elision, the screenwriters also elide the book’s most
conspicuous and dramatic elements of science (including some
fascinating, comedic drama about a trip through a two-dimensional space)
and, even more important, its elements of social science. L’Engle’s
Camazotz is a technological dystopia, a place of wonders that’s also a
place of cold uniformity. That uniformity is briefly displayed in the
movie (not nearly on the colossal, Busby Berkeley-style scale of
imaginative vision that the book suggests) and it’s, above all, never
explained. The Orwellian element of Camazotz (with L’Engle’s drolly
literal rendering of its mastermind) is gone from the film, and with it
go some of the book’s most spectacular elements of speculative fantasy
and most important character details, such as the significance of the
mode of combat that the children deploy against the evil forces. On the
other hand, the movie offers something else altogether—not a contest of
global and historical forces but, rather, their convergence in the
emotional life of one teen-age girl.

The center of the film is Storm Reid’s portrayal of Meg, a coup of
casting that’s crowned by DuVernay’s direction of her. Reid is a rare
departure from the usual run of exuberant and perky kids (of both sexes)
who tend to inhabit children’s films. There’s a mask-like implacability
to Meg, an approach to the world that, for all its anger and
frustration, doesn’t dare reveal itself fully, even to Meg herself. Her
stifled pain—at her father’s absence, at the gossip it sparks, at the
mockery and ostracism that she endures from the popular girls, with the
more perfect wardrobes and the more glittery manners, such as her
next-door neighbor, Veronica (Rowan Blanchard)—compacts itself into an
opaque expression and a far-reaching gaze.

The movie’s looming, tentacle-swarming monster is a king-size troll, a
provoker that seeks its opponents’ points of vulnerability. But coping
with pain, mastering pain, overcoming pain, and using pain to fight its
source is the very core of the film, as suggested in an aphorism from
Rumi that Mrs. Who cites twice: “The wound is the place where the light
enters you.” But, as if in order to put forward this lesson with a sort
of quasi-universality, to insure that more or less any kid can identify
with Meg, she and the other protagonists are rendered as nearly
trait-free. The casting of the movie is refreshingly varied, though the
film makes no allusion whatsoever to the significance of its diversity;
for all the film’s talk of faith “in who you are,” the identities of its
characters play no role in the story, and its lack of inner
construction—of definition of the characters along the lines of the
novel, of inborn idiosyncrasies and abilities—is among its weaknesses.
Meg’s brother, Charles Wallace, as written by L’Engle, is a sort of holy
fool, a conspicuous exception among children, a prophet or seer endowed
with great powers, while Meg is an ordinary type of math-and-science
prodigy, distracted and adept, for whom he’s a source of delight,
complicity, and trouble. In the movie, that distinction is far less
clear; Charles Wallace has only a vague kind of intuitive gift, and
merely comes off a bit charmingly odd. The movie is filled with other
vague relationships, vague doings—albeit all realized with verve, with
purpose, and with some giddily psychedelic imagery.

The problem with the movie’s adulteration of the novel is above all one
of an excess division of labor. For all the intellectual focus of her
direction, DuVernay is, as proved by “Selma,” an equally imaginative and
analytical screenwriter, and I wish that she had had as free a hand in
the crafting of the story, the adaptation of the novel, as she did
there. She isn’t credited as the screenwriter of “Selma”; Paul Webb is,
but she estimated that she rewrote “about ninety percent” of the script. (Webb disputes this
characterization.) There’s another—stronger, more detailed, less
sentimentalized—adaptation of L’Engle’s novel struggling to get out of
the one that’s onscreen. There’s also an element of political humor
that the premise suppresses—imagine hoping to bring Dad home after a
four-year absence just to tell him, “Guess who’s President.” It invites
a sequel: “Return to Camazotz.”